#the real horror here was drawing these cog wheels

[hu-arts]

Shumika week day 4 : Machina

Femween day 3 : horror movies

[dropped-stitches]

The Death of Hope

I am wrung out by war and tragedy, the cruelty of capitalism and the transgressions that people are driven to commit. 

I am neither rich nor poor, I’ve worked (like the vast majority of us) in jobs where I knew I was a cog in a capitalist wheel. I live, work, love, think and create - I exist - in the safe confines of a small life untouched by war and want. I feel smaller as the world gets bigger, here in my snug average life.

I am tired. So very tired. What can I do to help the world? I meditate, I think, I strive to be a better friend, partner, writer, to be a better human in the small ways that we are told will be good for us and for the world. I educate myself, I witness, I speak (loudly in real life, softly in the vastness of the internet). I cry, I rail, I rage against those injustices I know of, in the past, present and the future. 

And through it all, I lose hope. 

I lose hope atom by atom. I feel tiny bits of my soul being burned off with every new atrocity I hear of, and with the awareness of all the atrocities I know must be going on that I don’t know of. How heavy we’ve made life and living. How impossible it feels to hold on to humanity when our individuality is subsumed by the overpowering presence of the group. 

My life is filled with small, significantly insignificant interactions with people. I’ve found most people, one-on-one, want to be good to each other. Or, at the very least, most people, one-on-one, do not want to be bad to each other. Most of us just want to get on with our small lives, maximise our small wins and minimise our small losses. 

But put us together in a group, bring our - entirely human - need for belonging to the foreground, and we end up losing our small, harmless humanity to become part of something greater, and uglier, than the sum of its parts. 

I truly believe we were not made for the digital age. We were not, most of us, made for the sheer volume of information we have access to. We were not made to live our lives with the billions of people on the internet just a thin piece of glass away, shouting at us through the windows of our devices. Our minds are not made for a 24-hour news cycle, for living our lives online, or for consuming the amount of ‘content’ we do. Our brains, poor human things still stuck in the evolutionary rung of some distant pastoral past, are too fragile to handle the noise, and crave peace in the form of moments of silence and moments of boredom.

I also truly believe in the power of stories, in the inherent value of art and in creation. I’m using my luck and privilege now to get back into education and hopefully tell stories, but my voice feels small and selfish. But the very act of creating and writing feels self-indulgent, and posting online feels like adding to the chaos and cacophony on the internet and the world. What does my small, quiet, safe life have to offer in a world gone mad, but more noise and less peace?

There was a thread on r/askhistorians about completed genocides, and that’s where I found out about the people of the Banda islands, a whole society completely eradicated within a couple of decades by the Dutch because they wanted a monopoly on nutmeg and mace. A monopoly! The Banda were happy to trade with them, the way they traded with everyone else, but the Dutch policy was to have a monopoly on whatever they wanted to trade in. This information is going to live rent-free in my head, this event that happened four hundred years ago, that I can do absolutely nothing about. I sit on my comfortable sofa, warm and safe, and draw parallels between cruelty in the past and the present, and anticipate the cruelties of the future. What fresh horrors are we going to unleash upon the world this year, and the decades and centuries following? 

I think of the bloody dots that connect our shared history of fighting for land, fighting to take, to colonise, to retake, recover, fighting for wealth that masquerades as righteousness. All the while, most of us, the average cog in the capitalist machine, are fed intellectual and militaristic opium in the form of the idea that a group of people, of ‘peoples’, bound by made-up concepts, deserve some part of the world. We’ve been taught that humanity has inherited the earth, as though we own the whole world, and don’t share it with millions of other species. 

I think of how Palestinians, who have lived and loved, created, procreated and died on that blood-soaked land for thousands of generations, are been exterminated in the name of someone’s ‘Holy Land’ because...why? Because of something in the Old Testament? Because the British could not stop fucking up every land they touched? Because we have not been taught, as a species, to stop, just for once to please just fucking stop wanting more and more and more of everything? 

How can I not lose hope when we’re all caught up in this ugly mess of capitalism, geopolitics, nationalism and fundamentalist religion that cares nothing for the children buried under rubble. 

[antiquechampagne]

Beastly Kingdom - CH 9 - Greatest Show on Earth

( Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric from Pexels)

Liz loved watching the bustle around the park for the nearly invisible signs of her plan showing themselves. The invisible cogs quickened their pace when she received word the General was on his way from Sanctuary. Everything was coming together, even better than she had anticipated. As the General entered the park late in the afternoon, her sealed final instructions made their way to the respective gang leader. Liz decided to put Nate up in her penthouse for the night, satisfied with Dixie and Gage standing guard so no one would dare to try any funny business. The General wasn’t too happy about spinning his wheels for the night, but Liz had a few more final touches to complete before the show could start.

The sun rose in a hazy sky, but Liz had little time to sit and enjoy it, she had been up for hours. Dragging nearly ever raider to one place was a serious pain in the ass. The only venue large enough to house everyone was the main Nuka-Town square, right outside the circular market. A rudimentary stage had been built to add height and extend the 'map alcove', allowing those on stage to look down at the gathering crowd. Liz counted on the long-standing animosity to prompt self-segregation between the gangs. All she had to do was seed the prospective areas with the certain people to make sure each gang stayed in the zones she designated: Operators to her left, the Pack to the right with the Disciples milling about in the middle.

It was growing close to eleven when Liz got word that everyone was in attendance, the final few drug to their spots by an ornery Gage. She stood at the side of the stage as Mason and the rest of the leaders shuffled around off stage, trying to hide their boredom but keeping a cool eye on Nate. The crowd was getting restless. Liz let them stew a few minutes longer than was strictly necessary before ascending the steps, the other leaders trailing behind her.

Standing at center stage with her entourage flanking her, Liz looked out, quickly scanned the faces and belted out, “ALL RIGHT! EVERYONE, SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The crowd fell silent. She felt her voice could carry to the very corner of Nuka-World.

“I know what you assholes want to hear, but you… and the General…“ She glanced behind, glancing Nate up and down. "Are going to have to wait.” She heard a shuffle as, on cue, Mason guided Nate to upstage right, Mags and Nisha backing to the other.

“I want to make it absolute clear to each one of you sons-of-a-bitches here, that what we have here in Nuka-World is something unique… something fucking special. You aren't going to find anything like this anywhere else. And, as your Overboss, I'm not going to let anyone or anything take Nuka-World from us. I will do anything to keep us safe.” The crowd was drinking in her words. She decided to step it up a notch.

“Who’s going to keep you safe?” A weak chorus answered. She gave a death-glared down at the crowd, arms crossed. “Who?”

“The Overboss!” That was better.

She wanted more. “WHO?”

Nearly everyone was on their feet now “THE OVERBOSS!” Their answer thundered, followed by whoops and flailing weapons.

“That’s how I expect a true Nuka-World motherfucker to answer!” Liz puffed her chest out. “And who’s the baddest motherfucker in Nuka-World?”

“THE OVERBOSS!”

She thrust her hands out, quieting the cheering crowd.

“You’re damn right.”

She couldn't stop a smirk from spreading over her scarred lips. Time to make them shit their pants.

“Now, I want you to meet the newest member of the Nuka-World family.” She slapped her thigh, as if calling a dog to her side, only instead of a whistle; she let out a low growl.

The crowd glanced around nervously, confused. In the distance, a deep rumbling growl answered. Liz's smirk bloomed into a full on grin as she watched the audiences faces fill with fear. They all knew that sound. She just stood and drank it all in.

Behind the stage, a huge black clawed hand rose from inside the closed market and grasped the roof. With a swift feline-like grace, Big Mama made her entrance. Vaulting herself over the structure, the huge glowing creature landed with a thump next to Liz, snarling. The scattered screams and horror-filled eyes staring from the crowd was totally worth clearing out the market in the dead of night to lock Mama inside with a huge pile of meat.

Liz casually scratched Mama’s chin. “Say ‘Hi’, Big Mama” she prompted.

Mama trumpeted loudly, a supersonic shock wave knocking back the throng, several people in the front blown over by the force. The crowd semi-recovered, but were still frozen, unsure how to react.

In a distant corner, a single triumphant roar rippled across the impromptu theater.

"Fuck YEAH!"

The sound seemed to break the spell, as the entire crowd broke into a raucous applause, shouts and gunfire. Liz let the audience party as she directed Mama to stay behind her, motioning to her underbosses to join her by her side. The crowd, having released some nervous energy, naturally calmed down to where she could address them again.

“Now,” She walked to the edge of the stage. “Let’s get down to serious business at hand. There are only two organizations that pose any real threat to Nuka-World: The Minutemen and The Brotherhood of Steel. Our very existence is a bloody thorn in the side of the Minutemen's peaceful and flavorless vision of the Commonwealth. The Brotherhood, on the other hand, would cream themselves if they got their hands on all our pre-war tech and fire power. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that shit out. I'd been planning for since we started to expand outside of the park."

"Here, imagine my surprise when the Minutemen’s very own General Popsicle walking through the doors, offering a deal nonetheless.” Liz walked over to Nate, stretching her arm over his stiff shoulders. “Gotta hand it to’em, that took balls. More than I thought any Minuteman might have.” She gave him a little squeeze as her other hand slipped her knife out of its sheath on her hip. "But this deal, it got me thinking. -Thinking hard- about the future of everyone here. Here we are sitting pretty in our park, but how can we become something even stronger... spread our influence over the all Commonwealth, maybe even further? Would an alliance with the Minutemen be worth it?" Letting go, Liz began to pace next to Mason, picking at her teeth with the blade. "Just ask Gage... I thought about all this shit ‘till my brain was leaking out my ears. Then, I locked myself up tighter than Bradberton's hidden office bunker to figure all this out."

She made her way over to where three of raider leaders stood. This time she hung herself between the Black siblings, one arm draped over Mags' shoulders, the other over her brother. She still held her knife loosely, weaving it idly through the air under William's chin as she spoke. "I talked to all my underbosses about it, feeling everyone out. Getting their input, as it were."

Liz pursed her lips as if in thought for a moment, every movement calculated to pull in the audience's attention. With a disappointed shake of her head, her blade straightened itself on William's the stubble-speckled neck. "I hate to say it, but one gang just wasn't on-board with my plan." Her free hand gripped Mags metal clad shoulder. "And that is just unacceptable. I won't stand for it." It was so hard not to smile as she watched the shock and fear once again creep over the watching crowd.

Without another word, she swiftly turned the blade away from William and plunged it straight into Nisha's neck. Blood gurgled to her lips. She slumped to the floor. Mason grabbed Nate, whisking him off-stage to safety. On cue, the trusted senior members of the Operators and Pack in the audience unleashed a deadly storm of bullets on the Disciples sandwiched between them, slaughtering many before they even had the chance to draw their own weapons.

"NO!" Dixie sprang on Liz, her blades already drawn, her shock quickly dissolving into a murderous rage. "YOU DOUBLE-CROSSING BITCH!"

Liz didn't even have to move. She watched and grinned as a giant clawed hand effortlessly pinned Dixie to the boards. With a guttural snarl, Mama's giant jaws latched onto Dixie's metal-strapped helmet, crushing the life out of her lover in a matter of moments.

"Careful now, Mama," Ignoring the occasional projectile, Liz coaxed Mama to reluctantly let go of the twitching body. With a few quick slashes, she removed a few choice bits of metal armor. "I don't need you getting anything unpleasant stuck in your teeth. There you go, sweetie. Go to town." She gave an affectionate thump on the deathclaw's luminous hide.

A bullet grazed the Overboss's shoulder, causing her to wince. Turning on her heels, she faced the crowd, searching for the offending shooter. Once she locked eyes on the desperate man, she quickly dispatched him with a knife to chest.

"Ugh, seriously?" Fussing over her bloodied sleeve, she returned to Mama, who was happily munching away in the middle of the stage. The screams and gunfire began to wane. She gave the glowing creature a scratch before returning to the edge of the stage, looking at the bloody, body-filled ground where hundreds of people had once stood.

"Where were we... ah, yes. The plan. The remaining gang leaders have been briefed on the plan and have agreed to the terms." She motioned to Mason to bring Nate back on stage. He was looking decidedly greener around the gills. "Those terms being as follows. The Nuka-World raiders will aid the Minutemen in their offensive to end the Brotherhood. We will withdraw all our settlements and cease any expansion into the Commonwealth, keeping to Nuka-World." Liz pulled a cigarette from a pocket and lit it "In return, the Minutemen will share the spoils, as well as give us access to all established trade routes, along with exclusive and complete control to all chem trade and mercenary contracts within the Commonwealth," she nodded to the Blacks and Mason, respectively.

Nate, recovered, nodded in agreement. He stretched out his hand. Liz grabbed it, pulling him in close. "You're gunna love this next bit... soldier boy..." she whispered to him, pulling a lung full off the cigarette.

Liz gave a nod to Mason, who pulled a cowering Dr. Mackenzie up on stage. Liz reached into her pocket and pulled out a chunky black remote. Mackenzie gasped. The doctor knew a bomb collar detonator as soon as she saw it.

"Not only are we going 'legit', but, as an act of good will...“ Liz opened a compartment on the side, slipping a key into the waiting slot. As she turned, the red light on the detonator and Mackenzie's collar turned dark, the lock sliding open with a clunk. "All of the traders are now free to go and do as they please." She puffed, releasing a long stream of smoke. "However, as an incentive to stay and help Nuka-World grow, I am officially setting aside the town Bradberton as an area for anyone who wants to settle down in, under the complete protection of the Pack, of course."

Mason released a bewildered Mackenzie. All she could manage was to nod of comprehension, slowly skittering off stage as soon as Mason let go of her shoulders.

Liz turned back to the crowd. "And just to be crystal clear on this... anyone not on board with my plan..." she opened her arms dramatically before the sea of bullet ridden bodies before her, "can see my established termination policy." The whole park was as quiet as the grave, all except for the wet crunching of bone and meat from Mama and her meal.

"Seems we are in agreement then! Who's up for making the Brotherhood and the Commonwealth our little bitches?"

Every corner of Nuka-World rang with their thunderous answer.

[eponymous-rose]

Fic: Cold Comfort (Velora, Vex, Percy)

[AO3 | FFN | More Fic]

Major spoilers for Episode 115.

Two years after the battle with Vecna, Velora returns to Whitestone for several long-overdue conversations.

Cold Comfort

Velora stops at the shrine to the Raven Queen first, padding cautiously into the room, the stonework ice-cold beneath her bare feet, and says, softly, experimentally, "I hate you."

The shrine is empty at this early-evening hour, and so her words echo louder and more certain than she means them to. She swallows shyness with the remembered taste of ashes on her tongue, pushes past the heavy stench of blood in her nose and mouth, and says it louder, her voice cracking on the shout. "I hate you!"

There are no ripples on the surface of the small pool of blood, no dramatic flurry of feathers or dark wings curling around her. It's just a cold, stinky room.

She clears her throat, rubs her face to stop her lower lip quivering, and says, "Thank you," before turning on her heel and starting the long, slow trudge up to the castle.

She finds Percy first, after waving her way past the bemused guards and wandering aimlessly through a series of empty doorways. He's in his workshop, shirtsleeves pulled up past his elbows, weird hairy human arms covered in some sort of black grease as he scrubs with a cloth at an oversized contraption made of cogged wheels.

She watches him from the doorway, her brother by marriage, and not for the first time, her eyes catch on the rounded tips of his ears, the lenses that imperfectly correct his imperfect vision, the scruff on his chin and above his upper lip. These things, she knows, are the parts of her brother and sister that made them different and hated and neglected, the parts that made them not quite her brother and sister. Back when he'd been so terribly lost and sad, that had made a lot more sense. Now, watching him smile as he works, humming a quiet song she recognizes as a Syngornian lullaby she'd taught her sister, something twists in her chest.

When he sees her, he nearly drops the cloth in his hand in his surprise, eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. "Velora?"

She watches the expressions shift on his face: uncertainty, a self-conscious warmth, just plain self-consciousness, like he's trying to decide who to call to come deal with this situation. Then he visibly resets his stance, takes a breath, and smiles the kind of smile grown-ups rarely give her: honest, unsure, out of his depth. "Hi, Percy," she says, and leaps at him for a hug.

"You've gotten so big," he says, a little breathlessly. He's holding his hands awkwardly to the sides, trying to avoid smudging her fine clothing, but he finally relents and smooths her hair down when she beams up at him. "Not that it isn't a delight to see you, but what are you doing here?"

"Came to visit. Father and I were in Zephrah, and Keyleth opened the Sun Tree for me. It's a two-way thing, did you know that? She's opening it up again tomorrow, an hour after dawn."

Percy's brow furrows, and he takes a step back, looking her up and down. "You're not wearing shoes. Did anybody come with you?"

"Shoes are the worst," Velora tells him. "D'you know where Vex is?"

He narrows his eyes at the obvious distraction, but when she pulls him by the hand, he sighs and trails after her. "I expect she's fletching arrows in the study. What brought you to Zephrah?"

Velora hesitates at a cross-corridor, revisiting her memories of the castle, and can't quite stifle a grin when Percy would-be casually swings his hand toward the right corridor. Pulling him along with her, she says, "Father was there on some sort of diplomatic mission, and I asked if I could come along and see Keyleth."

"A diplomatic mission to Zephrah seems unusual," Percy says, thoughtfully, and she winces. He really is too smart.

Fortunately, that's when they round the corner and walk straight into her sister.

Velora yelps and flings herself into Vex's arms, dragging Percy with her into an awkward three-person hug that it takes Vex a full five seconds to settle into, out of sheer surprise. When she does, she says, "Hello, darling," in a wonderfully teary-eyed voice and plants a kiss on the crown of Velora's head—no longer as easy a task as it was when she was littler—and for just a moment everything in the world is wonderful and warm.

"I'll catch you two up later," Percy says, softly, disentangling himself from the hug. "Things were coming to a head with the clockwork mechanism, and I'd like to finish it off before taking a day to relax."

"Only one day?" Velora, cheek pressed against her shoulder, feels the shiver of her sister's barely suppressed laughter.

"A day or two," Percy says. "Three. A week. I'll take a week." And then, with an air of panic, "She's not wearing shoes, you know."

Velora backs up to yell, "Traitor!" at his retreating form, but finds herself bearing the full brunt of an appraising look from her sister.

Vex looks different, after Vecna, after Vasselheim, after... She looks different. Her smiles are a little slower to come, her laughter a little warmer, the lines at her eyes more pronounced than even her half-human side could explain. And sometimes, when she looks at Velora, she has a terribly sad smile that wrinkles the skin between her brows, and that smile didn't belong to her, before.

"Where in all the hells did you put your shoes, dear?"

Velora grins. Last year, when he and Zahra had come to visit Syngorn for the first time, Kashaw had called her a little shit for that exact grin. It's now her favorite grin to practice at every possible opportunity. "Zephrah."

Vex can't pick Velora up and carry her anymore—well, she probably could if she wanted to make a pretty hilarious display out of it—but the arm around her shoulders is vise-like as she draws her back into the study. "And what," Vex says, the same laughter still in her voice, "were you doing in Zephrah?"

Shrugging free, Velora settles into an overstuffed chair, bringing her knees up to her chest and pressing her dirty toes into the fabric. "Dad wanted to see the tree. The one Keyleth planted for Vax."

Vex falls more than sits in the chair across from her. "Oh."

Velora doesn't really want to look up, picking instead at some of the dirt caked under her toenail. "Yeah, I guess he'd sort of been avoiding it. It's real pretty, though. And he just kind of asked to be alone for a bit, I guess, you know. Talking to it. So I asked Keyleth if she could open the Sun Tree for me to come up here for the night."

"Velora. Dear." There's a long pause after the words, and Velora falls right into the trap, glancing up and meeting Vex's direct stare. "You shouldn't have come through alone. You walked up from the Sun Tree on your own?"

Probably best not to mention the detour to the Raven Queen's shrine. "No. I mean, yes, but I've done that kind of thing before. It's okay. The guards know me by now."

Vex's face crumples into a tearful smile. "Gods, you're not all that much younger than Vax and I were when we—" She swipes a hand across her eyes, then smiles bigger, brighter. "I'm sorry, darling. It's been a strange day. I'm delighted to see you, although I may have to have a word with Kiki about the age-appropriateness of sending a child to another city alone. And your hair is so short!"

Velora reaches up to it, shyly, tousling the locks that barely cover the tips of her ears. "You like it?"

"I love it."

Velora grins her little-shit grin. "Father hates it."

Vex laughs, leaning back in her chair. "Then I positively adore it."

Velora straightens, shuffles to the edge of her seat, lets her legs swing down to rest on the ground. "How are you?"

That catches Vex by surprise, and she pauses midway through what looks like a reflexive laugh. Grown-ups do that a lot, Velora has found, when she asks a question like an adult. But after the brief hesitation, Vex smiles and says, "Better every day, sweetheart. Thank you for asking. How are you?"

Velora chews her lower lip, staring down, wringing her hands in her lap. "I dream a lot. And it's never the parts of it I want to dream about, the nice people cheering, the nice people at the Platinum Sanctuary. Vax. It's... it's green light, and... and nobody says it, everybody tries really hard not to say it, but I died, didn't I?"

Silence; Velora can almost hear the lies being shuffled through, carefully selected and discarded, one by one. Then Vex says, "You did. I did, too. A while ago. We never told you the details. Our brother made a deal for my life. Kashaw raised me then, too, only I think the Raven Queen interfered before Vesh could get involved the way she did with you."

Velora meets her gaze again, steady and unflinching. "I think I've been dreaming about Vesh. I tried to tell Kashaw last time I saw him. He just sort of got scared. But I dream about her a lot."

The words hang in the air for a long, long moment until she fears the weight of them will crush them both.

Then, "Gods. Fuck," Vex says, and the first word somehow feels like a stronger curse than the second. She pushes up from her chair, paces up and down the room, breathing fast, like something caged.

Startled, Velora hops to her feet. "What is it? Is it bad? What does it mean?"

Vex whirls around, and there's a truly stricken expression on her face that's so, so much worse than the soft murmurs of death and pain and horror that find her at night. The tears begin to streak down Velora's cheeks before she's even aware she's started crying, and Vex seems to snap back to herself in that moment, face closing off into a concerned half-smile, pulling Velora into a tight hug, pressing her face to her shoulder the way she had in Vasselheim, the way she had after the fight, and Velora remembers the taste of ashes.

"It's all right, darling. I'm sorry I scared you. Nightmares are normal after what you've been through. I'll talk to your mother about clerics in Syngorn, all right? We'll find someone to help you, to talk to you."

Velora inhales, shakily, the faint perfumes barely masking the scent of forest and sweat, and says, "I'm sorry I made you sad again."

"Never, darling. Never." Vex lifts her off her feet for a moment, twirls her in a little half-spin. "I'm so glad you told me. I'm just sorry you were suffering alone."

They stay like that for a long, long time, until Velora starts to get self-conscious about how much snot she's getting on her sister's fine robes and pulls back a bit. Vex responds by bending down so they're eye-to-eye, the way Vax always used to, and brushes the tears away. "I love you, dear. You're not alone, and you're welcome here anytime." A wink. "We'll just have to figure out a way to get you here more often so you don't have to take advantage of a certain well-meaning but distracted archdruid to sneak away."

"Okay," Velora says, and when Vex sits back in her chair, she cuddles up next to her, a bit too tall and lanky now to make it comfortable, but they both pretend to ignore the discomforts of bony elbows and knees. "Did you dream? After you died, I mean."

"Not that time. But there was another time I was hurt very badly." Unexpectedly, Vex smiles, settling a hand comfortably in Velora's hair and staring at the opposite wall of the room with a warmth of memory. "I was flying above the battlefield and a spell brought me down. I was so sure when I finally went to sleep that I'd dream of falling and falling and falling, but it turned out the only thing my brain cared to remember when I was asleep was the flying part."

Velora laughs. "That's really wonderful, in a weird sort of way."

"I'm a little alarmed that you're grasping the idea of backhanded compliments so young. Feeling better?"

Velora doesn't answer right away, considering. "Yeah. I think I am. Just tired."

Another crooked smile, not quite hers. "I know. And dear? What do you think about nieces and nephews?"

Velora takes a time to consider that one as well. "I think Trinket will always be my favorite."

Vex laughs, low and warm and genuine. "He'll be delighted to hear that. Your room's all made up and ready, you know. It always is. We can talk in the morning, which is when I assume you've scammed Keyleth into smuggling you back?"

Velora, disentangling herself from the chair, manages to stay stone-faced for about two heartbeats before she bursts out laughing. "Yeah. I'll talk to you in the morning."

Tousling her hair, Vex grins. "Sleep well."

Late in the night, when the moon hangs high and she grows tired of waiting for her racing thoughts to slow, Velora begrudgingly slips on her borrowed boots and a heavy coat and treads softly out the door of her room into the corridors of the castle.

She knows how to carry herself to look a little bit older from a distance so a guard won't stop her on sight, knows how to keep to the shadows that human vision cannot penetrate. It's easy enough to slip past the outward-facing defenses of the castle and into the cold night air, watching her breath fog before her, the heat from the city below hanging in masses of fog like smoke in the air. She doesn't like looking down at the city from here, remembers with nightmarish precision how Vasselheim had looked from above, burning and burning and with the taste of her own death at the back of her tongue.

Veering away, she steps almost immediately off the well-trodden paths into snow that cracks and sinks under her weight, slowing her progress like wading through a world coated in heavy blankets that tug at her feet and legs, urging her to stop and rest.

She's breathing heavily by the time she finds the small clearing, eyes already welling up at the possibility that she's misremembered the path, that she's managed to get lost, that she'll wander forever alone in the dark. She's come out here twice before, alone both times, after Vex had shown her the spot, but there are plenty of twists and turns to trip up a distracted mind...

She finds it all the same: two trees with slightly more gnarled branches than most, and a single bench, lovingly but imperfectly constructed beneath it.

Swiping at her streaming nose and the tears in her eyes, she huffs out a breath and plops down into the middle of the bench, staring up through the gaps in the branches above at the uncommonly clear night sky. A low grunt of breath draws her attention.

"Hi," she says, softly.

Two bright eyes between the tree trunks shift closer, obscured by the fog of breath in the air, and then sleek, silvery fur glints under the moonlight as the wolf pads up to sit beside the bench and rest his head on her lap.

She scratches behind his ears, distractedly, already back to watching the stars. "You remember me, don't you? I didn't think you'd be here still. I didn't think there were wolves in these woods. The grown-ups never mentioned you. Maybe I'm imagining you."

The wolf grumbles, nosing into her hand, and she sighs, stroking his muzzle, pausing only to pick at some of the dirt and twigs caked into his fur. "Father says I can't have a pet, which means I desperately want to bring you home with me, but that's probably not fair to you."

The wolf sighs. She sighs back. It's cold outside, but between the warm coat and the wolf's heavy weight, she feels positively cosy.

A light streaks across the sky, a shooting star, and she smiles up at it. "I didn't even know I had a brother for a long time," she says. "I wanted brothers and sisters when I was little, so badly, and then there were these two tall angry grown-ups who sometimes yelled at Father but always smiled at me."

She pauses in scratching the wolf's head, just to hear his semi-inquisitive grunt, before starting again. "And now I've got Percy and Cassandra and Keyleth and Scanlan and Pike and Grog, and they're my brothers and sisters, too. And I guess maybe I thought that was how it worked, that you just kept getting more and more and more family and none of them ever went away for good."

She reaches down, pulls the belt from around her waist, and tells the wolf, sternly, "Be nice to Simon. He's very shy."

The snake twists to life, coils around her arm, clinging almost painfully to her, and she whispers, "Sorry about the cold," and lets him coil up inside her coat to keep warm.

She waits a moment or two, but the wolf doesn't seem interested in having a snake for dinner, and eventually she relaxes again. "Father talks to Vax, sometimes. At the tree. Other times. But I don't think I want to do that. I don't think I want to talk to him unless he can talk to me, too. Unless I can see him."

She closes her eyes and holds her breath for several heartbeats, fooling herself into listening for a whisper of wings, gripping so tightly to the fur on the top of the wolf's head that he whines a soft protest.

"Sorry," she whispers, opening her eyes and petting the spot she'd pulled. "Sorry." She glances up at a glint of light; another shooting star, she thinks, or just the regular stars smearing a bit with tears.

"Anyway," she says, "I'm going to head back to the castle and maybe see if I can try to dream about flying, but for a little bit, would it be okay if I talked to you instead? If I told you all the things I wanted to tell him?"

The wolf glances up at her with one baleful eye, snorts, then backs away, plopping down in the snow and regarding her with an eerily intelligent expression.

Velora draws her knees up to her chest, curling protectively around Simon, and says, softly, "I miss you," and watches the stars, and says nothing more.